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Strategy

Strategy is the main recording project of Paul Dickow, a musician, DJ and producer based in Portland, Oregon. Dickow started working under the name in the late 1990s, and his records move through dub, house, ambient and more experimental electronic forms. He also runs the Portland label Community Library. Dickow made two albums as Strategy for Kranky, Drumsolo's Delight (2004) and Future Rock (2007). Later records include Pods of Punishment (Entr'acte, 2015) and Information Pollution (Further Records, 2016). Before Community Library he ran the label Archigramophone.

Aliases: Paul Dickow
Chandler and Dickow Play Fisher
On Chandler and Dickow Play Fischer, David Chandler and Paul Dickow treat Marcus Fischer’s graphic scores as a lab problem rather than a script, using tracing paper, chalk, piezo styli, EEG data and a 1970s modular synth to probe what it means to “play” an image without simply projecting themselves onto it.
A Cooler World
Portlander Paul Dickow, as Strategy, presents his latest album— A Cooler World. Fascinated by the unfamiliar limitations and inherent playability of a hand-me-down, 1989 model sampling keyboard, he played these pieces by hand, mostly abandoning the sequencer driven framework of sampling based music; he plays the sampler here the way a guitarist approaches the guitar. A Cooler World is a deep dive into glacial, pensive soundscapes that navigate the boundaries between experimental, ambient, and da…
Information Pollution
180-gram LP. Includes printed inner sleeve. Like some ingenious combination of John Cage's chance operations and the numbers station data stream captured on The Conet Project, Strategy's Information Pollution immerses listeners in baffling sonic waters. It's a riveting work that converts the enigmatic effluvia of shortwave and dispatch radio chatter into thrumming, static-riddled clouds of ambience. An undercurrent of unease wafts through Information Pollution's four lengthy tracks, as barely au…
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Pods Of Punishment
Pods of Punishment, like parallel collection Seeds of Paradise (Idle Hands), is a journey into tube-amped molten bass and media fragments. It reveals Strategy’s strong science fiction threads and fixation on radio as a musical medium: its ghostly disembodiment, its persistent familiarity, and its spontaneous impact on the sounds around it. "The unstoppable Paul Dickow a.k.a. Strategy shapeshifts between dub, techno and the ambient spaces between on 'Pods of Punishment' for Entr'acte. Covering al…